Tag Archives: energy

December 2015 in Review

Now it’s time to review December 2015, before we get on to reviewing 2015 as a whole.

Negative stories (-10):

  • Some car dealers are deliberately talking customers out of buying electric cars that they want, because the car dealer will make less money on oil changes. (-1)
  • Breaking news: we can’t believe everything we hear on the internet. Some of it is deliberate government and corporate propaganda, and some is “online filter bubbles” or marketing algorithms telling each of us only what we want to hear. Data used by all these algorithms is becoming more and more valuable. (-1)
  • Cyberattacks or superflares could destroy the U.S. electric grid. (-1)
  • Guns cause gut-wrenching, accidental deaths of children quite frequently in the U.S. The U.S. has a rate of violent assault 5-10 times higher than our close Anglo-American cousins, which in turn have higher rates than most of Europe and developed Asia. (-1)
  • I mused about whether it is really possible the U.S. could go down a fascist path. I reviewed Robert Paxton’s five stages of fascism. I am a little worried, but some knowledgeable people say not to worry. After reading Alice Goffman’s book On the Run though, one could conclude that a certain segment of our population is living in a fascist police state right now. There is some fairly strong evidence that financial crises have tended to favor the rise of the right wing in Europe. (-2)
  • After more than a decade of drought, there may not be enough water to sustain both Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the U.S. desert southwest. Some are suggesting draining Lake Powell. (-1)
  • This year’s “super El Nino” might have happened with or without climate change, but climate change made it more likely. I have to admit though I enjoyed sitting on my front porch in shorts on Christmas here in Philadelphia. (-1)
  • Jeffrey Sachs makes a pretty good case that the rise of violent religious fanaticism in the Middle East is largely the CIA’s fault. (-2)

Positive stories (+13):

    • Las Vegas is planning to go all renewable by 2017, mostly centralized solar. (+1)
    • Children have a natural aptitude for learning to recognize patterns. Now all we have to do is figure out which patterns we should be teaching them to recognize. (+1)
    • Some U.S. Presidential candidates want to invest in infrastructure, which is good. A national infrastructure plan might also be good. (+1)
    • Ericcson released some technology predictions for 2016 and beyond: Artificial intelligence will start to assist us without the need for smartphone screens. Virtual reality will start to come into its own for tech support, sports, dating, and shopping. And we will start to see more sensors embedded in our homes and eventually our bodies. (+1)
    • Trends in Ecology and Evolution made some technology predictions too: “managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China”. (+1)
    • A serious but treatable infection can destroy a tumor. (+1)
    • Self-driving cars could drastically reduce the amount of land required for parking in cities. There are some moves toward car-free central cities around the world. (+3)
    • We had the Paris agreement. It is possible to be cynical about this agreement but it is the best agreement we have had so far. (+2)
    • New York City recently finished planting a million trees. (+2)

So we end the year on a positive note!

November 2015 in Review

What did I learn in November? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-10):

  • The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report came out. Some of the top risks are interstate conflict, water crisis, failure of climate change adaptation, unemployment and underemployment. Hmm, that “interstate conflict” items might be what we used to call “war”. And I think there might be one underway right now in the Middle East, which Jimmy Carter says we are getting all wrong. And it just might be caused by the other items on the list. And speaking of war, there is a new book on the Vietnam War aimed at the middle grades, but it seems pretty harsh for that age to me. (-2)
  • I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out. (-3)
  • This crop of presidential candidates is easy for comedians to make fun of. I enjoy it but think it may be a contrary indicator for the health of the country. (-1)
  • Bicycle helmets are not making U.S. bicycle riders any safer. This is why we need streets designed on the European model to be safe for driving, bicycling, and walking. It’s 100% known technology and there can be no excuses! (-2)
  • In current events, we had the awful, shocking terrorist attacks in Paris. I suggested that the long-term answer to violence caused by angry young men anywhere is to understand why they are angry, address their legitimate grievances, and give them productive work to do. Short term, we also have to detect and disrupt any plots involving nuclear or biological weapons, of course, because we can’t afford even one. (-2)

Positive stories (+9):

car dealers sabotaging electric cars

The New York Times says car dealers are actively subverting peoples’ attempts to buy electric cars, even when they really want them. One reason they cite is that electric cars need less service like oil changes, and dealerships actually make a lot more money from service than from sales. This may be a rational explanation. But part of the explanation may also be that people can get sucked into longstanding institutional cultures even when they are highly irrational. I face this quite often in my work, and I have faced it around the world – groups of people can be incredibly motivated to defend the status quo, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that there are better ways, and even when the people in question are young, intellgient, well-educated and well-intentioned. Sometimes the facts just do not matter. I don’t have the answer to this, if you do please let me know.

Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem

I have heard from know-it-alls that the problem with renewable energy is that it is intermittent and hard to store. I have always thought there are many ways to deal with that – charge a battery, pump water uphill, heat something, wind a spring, compress air, electrolyze water into hydrogen and charge a fuel cell. Those are my thoughts with absolutely no expertise at all, but luckily the experts are thinking about this too:

Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, and Bethany A. Frew. A low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes. PNAS 2015; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1510028112, 2015

This study addresses the greatest concern facing the large-scale integration of wind, water, and solar (WWS) into a power grid: the high cost of avoiding load loss caused by WWS variability and uncertainty. It uses a new grid integration model and finds low-cost, no-load-loss, nonunique solutions to this problem on electrification of all US energy sectors (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) while accounting for wind and solar time series data from a 3D global weather model that simulates extreme events and competition among wind turbines for available kinetic energy. Solutions are obtained by prioritizing storage for heat (in soil and water); cold (in ice and water); and electricity (in phase-change materials, pumped hydro, hydropower, and hydrogen), and using demand response. No natural gas, biofuels, nuclear power, or stationary batteries are needed. The resulting 2050–2055 US electricity social cost for a full system is much less than for fossil fuels. These results hold for many conditions, suggesting that low-cost, reliable 100% WWS systems should work many places worldwide.

July 2015 in Review

I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

condensation

Here’s an article on using condensation as a water supply. It’s a somewhat obvious idea – first, collect all that air conditioner condensate and use it for something. Second, use solar energy to condense some more.

The machine is based on Spanish technology. Local developers John Vollmer and Moses West are testing it out and allowing it to be evaluated by numerous entities, including the military.

The machine takes water from the air in the form of humidity and converts it into drinking water. It’s not a new process, but the machine does it on a large scale and much more economically than before.

“As long as you have 30 percent humidity or greater, there’s no such thing as a drought,” West said.

“global renaissance of coal”

This article from the National Academy of Sciences says that although coal use is dropping in some developed countries and China, it is exploding in many developing countries.

Coal was central to the industrial revolution, but in the 20th century it increasingly was superseded by oil and gas. However, in recent years coal again has become the predominant source of global carbon emissions. We show that this trend of rapidly increasing coal-based emissions is not restricted to a few individual countries such as China. Rather, we are witnessing a global renaissance of coal majorly driven by poor, fast-growing countries that increasingly rely on coal to satisfy their growing energy demand. The low price of coal relative to gas and oil has played an important role in accelerating coal consumption since the end of the 1990s. In this article, we show that in the increasingly integrated global coal market the availability of a domestic coal resource does not have a statistically significant impact on the use of coal and related emissions. These findings have important implications for climate change mitigation: If future economic growth of poor countries is fueled mainly by coal, ambitious mitigation targets very likely will become infeasible. Building new coal power plant capacities will lead to lock-in effects for the next few decades. If that lock-in is to be avoided, international climate policy must find ways to offer viable alternatives to coal for developing countries.

 

passive house

Here is a long article with some details on the passive house standard, which promises order of magnitude energy use reductions in buildings. It was invented in the United States, forgotten/ignored in the United States, adopted in Europe, and now is finally filtering back from Europe into the United States.

The passive house standard requires a tightly sealed and heavily insulated building envelope to ensure optimum energy efficiency. The minimum airtightness level allowed is 0.6 air changes per hour under 50 pascals of pressure. To ensure that a house is in compliance with this limit and that there are no leaks, the building’s designers conduct an on-site blower door test. “The biggest challenge is the sealing,” says Priputen, adding, “If you have a weak spot you have to make all of the other areas stronger in terms of insulation and air sealing.”

The other main pillar of passive house construction is a compact air and heat exchange system that conserves energy by transferring heat and/or moisture between incoming and outgoing streams of air. Designers specify one of two systems, depending on the site’s climate: heat recovery ventilators (HRVs), which transfer only heat, or energy recovery ventilators (ERVs), which transfer both heat and moisture.